Dr. K’s Top Ten Words For Healthy Communication

by Dr. Rick Kirschner on January 7, 2013

What is healthy communication? The purpose of healthy communication is to bring about positive change. This past weekend, I delivered the Healthy Communication Workshop at Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine. This might have been the last time, at least for awhile, as I’m unable to present in September due to a scheduling conflict. Here’s what I told my latest crop of freshmen med students.

Positive change is ultimately is the role of any doctor whose primary concern is the health of his or her patient, whether that’s restoring it, maintaining it, or increasing it. That’s not all doctors of course, as many are disease focused. (With conventional doctors whose main focus is disease, their primary concern is to properly diagnose and then treat the disease, usually by prescribing petroleum derivatives and then at some point cutting off the troublesome body parts).

Healthy communication is fundamental in the doctor/patient relationship. But healthy communication isn’t just about interacting with patients. And it isn’t just for doctors and medical students.

It’s also essential for students to be able to deal with each other in a high stress environment, and to engage with their teachers and school administrators too. It’s also a necessary element in dealing with the community around the school, the profession itself, and in building connections between the profession and potential allies in the policy making arena. And it’s for the rest of us too, because we all find ourselves in situations where our communication has the potential to create and initiate positive outcomes, if we go about it in a healthy way, or perpetuate and even aggravate a problem if we don’t.

The workshop is organized around ten words.

Word.

Story.

Trust.

Listen.

Influence.

Attitude.

Purpose.

Support.

Teamship.

Integrity.

Feel free to leave a comment in which you riff on (not rip off) these words, or question them, or offer your insights and guesses as to what they mean and how they apply to the topic of Healthy Communication.

I feel like a communicator in a sea on non-communicators. It’s been frustrating. We moved to a small town about 8 years ago & have been so disappointed at the difference between the open & free communication of people from the big city we moved from & the closed communication of the small town we moved to. I pretty much get all the 10 words except teamship (kudos on your new word, sure to be in the dictionary one day) and trust. But I think those are deficiencies on my part, not because there is any question as to their placement on the list. For ex trust I struggle with because I’ve been lied to so many times that when a certain person says they will do something such as return my phone call, I automatically don’t believe them. Teamship I don’t understand because unless one is speaking on behalf of a board I don’t understand how they can speak for a team unless its a “team of 1”. Anyway as always, I am enjoying your articles.

Ruth,
Thank you for your comment! I can relate to the idea of being a communicator in a sea of non-communicators, it sure seems like that sometimes.

Regarding trust, I find that I can trust people who are untrustworthy to behave in an untrustworthy fashion. Trusting that, I plan and act accordingly. But the point of it as a healthy communication word is that without trust, it is very difficult to exercise anything other than a negative influence. And the idea of teamship is this: Many hands make light work. We get results through people, and all of us are smarter than any of us. So bringing the right people together around a task makes it more likely that the task will be done to completion and be successful. As a blogger, I could say that you are on my team, by virtue of your participation on the blog. And the blog is better with you than without you!